Excerpts From the New Book ‘In Deep: The Collected Surf Writings of Matt George’
The surfing life often is often accompanied by an expiration date. Days, months, or even years of people’s lives are spent hunting perfect waves, competing on tour, socializing with past and future legends of the surfing world. For some, it lasts longer than others, spreads into other parts of their lives like a disease. And then, all of a sudden, these people cut it off. Move inland. Start families. Get normal jobs. The explosive and all-consuming bonfire that was surfing is now on the safe and reliable back burner. It’s difficult to live this fully, to chase anything for so long. But Matt George is different. He got into it, and he hasn’t left.
I met Matt at the Thruster Club next to White Monkey Surf Shop in Bali. There was a …Lost surf film premiere that night, and Matt was floating from table to table, darting between cigarette fumes and lines of neon light, tuning in and joining each animated conversation effortlessly. He came over to our table, asking, with a concerned expression, how the poke bowls were. Looking at the mound of unfinished rice in my bowl, he advised me to ask for less rice next time.
In that moment, I had no idea the man tipping me off about rice was Matt George. Through working for Matt Warshaw on the Encyclopedia of Surfing, my mind was a reel of stills from Matt’s lifetime: Matt, standing in hot sand with Jon Damm, Willy Morris, and Rell Sunn on a beach in China, teaching nine young children how to surf. Matt, watching his brother take off on a wave at Trestles as he is bussed down to the Naval Training Center in Point Loma. Matt, modeling for Karl Lagerfeld.
My friend elbows me and shakes his head at my widened eyes. I call Matt back to the table, stammering something complimentary about his writing. He sits down. After chatting, he tells me, “I just released a book. Maybe you can review it.” I nod. I’d been wanting to read it, actually.
The book, titled In Deep, is over 500 pages without the forward from Kelly Slater. I leave for Sumatra the next day, and finish the entire thing before stepping out of the car at my final destination. The preface begins with Matt criticizing traditional surf stories for their shortchanging of real surfing lives, and ends with a promise to the reader of an understanding of what actually constitutes a meaningful surfing life.
In raw, prose-like writing, Matt pens the defining moments of lives defined by their dedication to surfing: a teenager on the World Qualifying Series in a cheap strip club grinding with a woman twice his age. A newly-wed couple cowering in the confines of a sweltering plane full of drunken, raucous surfers on their way to Herbie Fletcher’s Cabo Classic. Layne Beachley’s ice-blue eyes welling with tears as she recalls her childhood on a beach at the edge of the Mentawais.
Matt is still in Bali, so we talk on Zoom. The kids in my homestay are noisy. In a last resort of desperation, I pay two Indonesian men to pause cutting apart a palm tree that fell in a storm the night before. The wifi is spotty and MMA plays on TV in the background. Matt is relaxed, straightforward. “I’m no stranger to the difficulties of Indonesian internet.” He gestures to the TV. “But can we turn that off? I don’t need to see people beating each other senseless while we’re talking.”
Halfway through our first call, a man steps into his room, tells Matt that Mikala Jones’ ceremony is in half an hour. Matt apologizes, says we’ll have to finish another time. He keeps his promise, and I understand: this is how Matt’s life is. Involving yourself so deeply in so many lives has its challenges. But somehow, he manages. Thrives on it. And wrote a book about it.
Your surfing life has bee full, eh?
Yeah. I’ve been lucky enough to be a senior contributing editor at SURFER magazine for about 35 years. I write for all the major surf websites and I have for my entire life. I was a professional surfer in the ‘80s. I first started surfing when I was eight in 1967. I was taught in Waikiki. I have a very global experience and a very global outlook as an insider into the surfing world, both professionally and philosophically.
Do you think your upbringing has any impact on what you write about, or did that come from your professional surfing career?
It came from travel, very early. I had crossed the Atlantic twice by the time I was eight and then I traveled to Hawaii with my family, by ship. I had great deal of travel at a very young age and it continued all my life. That global awareness really affected my writing. That and the fact that my mother was a great writer. A frustrated writer, but a great one.
What was your biggest motivation for putting this book together?
Collecting all these stories, my main motivation was getting it in under the rise of Chat GPT and AI. I look at this book like the last elephant. AI is going to shoot all of this down. The younger generation is not going to read or write their own things; they’re not going to have their own thoughts.
The features in this book can give you, individually, the zeitgeist of what I feel is the most dynamic and remarkable era in the history of our sport. Nothing else happened as dynamically as it has from the ‘80s to today when it comes to design, performance, technology, philosophy, professionalism, the rise of million-dollar surfers.
This is not a history book, it’s a time travel book. You can go back and travel in time and see what was going on then. And I tell young readers who ask me about the book, it’s simple: if you don’t look into surfing, it won’t look back at you.
So, this book is a lens into each era?
These are profiles of people, stories of travel, essays and thoughts that capture the moments of this time. Because of the credibility I have, having been a professional surfer, having been on the world tour, I was able to have very deep access. I was able to go backstage all my life.
I’m an insider. I’m like Jimmy Page if he quit Led Zeppelin and became a writer. I was on the pro tour, a hardcore surfer, Channel Islands team member who gave feedback on every surfboard. I lived in the Tom Curren era, we lived together, and I was in there, man.
Then I started writing for the international media when I retired from the tour and became a writer and photographer for SURFER. I had something in my writing called “the five-day rule.” I would not do a profile on someone unless I could live with them for five days, and I mean live in their house or where they are or get in a car and travel on the tour with them.
I was influenced by Rolling Stone magazine, and especially by these backstage reports and these reporters who really got into it. They were backstage with David Bowie and Led Zeppelin and all these people. Then it changed to celebrity interviews, where all of a sudden the reporter got 15 minutes with Keanu Reeves in the cafe while he was promoting his new movie and then they would leave and then the next journalist would sit down and get their 15 minutes. I do not do that. One of the reasons I do not have a profile of John John Florence in here is because I can’t get anywhere near him.
The Kelly Slater profile is so moving; you talk about him sleeping. It was such a vulnerable position to write about someone in.
When I showed up, he was in a very humble situation with his single mother. They were sleeping on mattresses on the floor under moving blankets. I grew up in a family where we had four boys in one room, so when they said, “you’re bunking with Kelly,” it seemed perfectly natural to me. The reaction of the surfing world was so homophobic and weird, like, so I was sleeping in a bed on a mattress on the floor next to Kelly, what’s the big deal? But wow, did everyone react. It’s like, “sorry guys, you got any brothers?” But that’s one of those five-day rule things: I got into it. I lived with Shane Horan on his commune, I lived with Mark Occhilupo when he got his first little apartment. I lived with Layne Beachley, with Keala Kennelly.
We deserve to know these people as surfers. We dress like them, we buy the products they’re pushing, we cut our hair like them, we want to surf like them. We deserve to know who these people are who are influencing us this deeply, and we deserve a connection. Our sport is about individuality, about philosophy, and deep, deep addiction. We deserve to have the whole picture, and we are being robbed of that by today’s media.
Photo: Matt George
Your profile on Keala Kennelly was powerful. I know you said that photo was vulnerable, which it was, but many of your portrayals of women felt very strong. And a lot of the portrayals of men felt less macho than how surf magazines traditionally portray male surfers. Did you actively try to play with these gender roles? Or did the juxtaposition happen naturally and that’s just what you see when you spend so much time with them?
Men are vulnerable, women are powerful. These women that I’ve come in contact and had the honor to write these stories about have always come across as powerful human beings. And it has really impressed me. And that has happened organically. The Stephanie Gilmore story, the Layne Beachley story, Keala Kennelly, all these stories. I would look at these women and think of the challenges they faced compared to men: the gender challenges, the misogyny, the physicality, the courage of it all. Every one of them gave me an impression of power, not weakness. The men, once you get inside their heads, are far more vulnerable. They have not had to face any challenges about gender or sexuality or objectivity or any of these things. Those are not even part of their life. They’re just handsome men. So their vulnerability comes in a completely different arena, and it’s usually family. But, in a sentence, I have discovered in my long career that women are powerful and men are vulnerable.
Do you ever feel like being personally close with your subjects creates dilemmas?
No. You build this mutual bond with the subject and you both know that you’re going to tell the truth. Whatever that is, you’re going to tell the truth. But the other thing that I always try to add to my stories is mythology. I’ve always seen myself as a part-time mythologist. I believe in heroism and I believe in courage and mythology with these people because they are our superheroes and they are our Ulysseses and they are our Cleopatras. This is the mythology, the stories that will last through the millennia. I try to find the heroism in every surfer I’ve ever talked to and every place I’ve gone to, like Bell’s Beach. Bell’s Beach is a very heroic place. With the internet swiping left and right and up and down, there’s no more cave paintings. I respect very much the mythology of storytelling, because they will last forever, they are in print, and they are our cave paintings.
A lot of your writing also feels philosophical. Is that intentional as well?
I believe in the cosmic connection of our sport. I believe that surfing is something absolutely extraordinary in the natural world. Our addiction and our connection and our belonging to these waves, to this place, to what we do when we jump off the edge of a continent and go out into a completely different world that’s like outer space to 95 percent of the entire population. There is something very moving and natural and cosmic there, a real connection. And I think it’s important.
One thing that always irritates me is making fun of surfing all the time. “It’s silly what we’re doing. It’s just a little pastime.” I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it’s a silly thing to do. I don’t think it’s a pastime. The connection that we have when we surf is very different than mainstream sports. Surfing isn’t so much a sport as it is a place. It’s a place we want to be. We want to be on this wave that’s moving, and it moves us, and we want to crawl inside us and then we want to come back out again. Surfing is an aim. It’s something to achieve. There’s a greatness in that, whether you’re a six-year-old kid with your oversized wetsuit dragging your soft-top down to the beach, or whether you’re John John Florence dropping in at One Man bay.
A lot of the stories in your book involve Indonesia, specifically Bali, and there is a theme of the ongoing demolition of this spiritual and beautiful place. Is there a motive there, or do you just write about Indonesia as you have experienced it?
I first came to Indonesia in 1984, and it really put the zap on me as a recovering Catholic. We were raised Roman Catholic, and when I first started surfing in Waikiki, that’s when spirituality came into my world. Waves taught me spirituality as opposed to religion. When I got to Bali in 1984, bingo, this place is spiritual. You can feel it like when you’re on the big island of Hawaii and it comes up through your feet, what they call mana. There’s so much of that here. And Bali was woven into my life as a traveling surfer, of course, with the annual trips.
This is the greatest, most exotic surfing crossroads on the globe. It’s got the most sensational waves and all the discoveries and all of this. And so I lived all of that: the spirituality and the love that I have for Indonesia comes through in this book very naturally because I’m so comfortable here. I’ve lived here permanently now for almost 15 years. Even though I travel a great deal, Bali and Indonesia satisfies my powerful desire for the exotic, for the spiritual, and for the geographically beautiful. I have to have that in my life. I cannot live in a tract home on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach.
So, yes, the stories are always tinged with spirituality and hope. And sadness at how it’s been beat up, but yet it still survives. I live here and it’s my life, so it comes through that way. I’m not an expat. I’m an immigrant. I’m here legally. I have married a beautiful Indonesian woman. I have a job. I publish a magazine. I’m part of the surfing community, which makes me part of the international community, and it’s a very important, spiritual place for me.
Yes, when we first met at the film premiere at White Monkey, you seemed very involved in the community.
I’m in there every day. I’m in there. Even today, I’m headed over to Uluwatu and I’ll be hanging with Matt Biolas and the …Lost crew and Mason and Ian and all these people. We’re with Ian Crane and of course all the Balinese surfers. I have always strived to tell my stories from the Indonesian point of view.
It never seemed right to me that all the stories about Indonesia were like men visiting a hooker. They’d show up, they’d get great waves, they scored, and then they’d leave. The respect I have for the local surfers here is extraordinary: what they do and the way they surf and how they weave spirituality into their life and family is everything. Then, you throw in waves that are so perfect that they’re difficult to describe. We’ve all seen the photos: the temples on the hills, the exotic flora and fauna, monkeys all over the place. It’s just this extraordinary place with an extraordinary local people. You have to get inside it. Surfers are among the greatest travelers in the world because we travel with a purpose. We go there to do something, not just go there to smoke pot and hang around in Sri Lanka. We are there for a physical, immersive, embedded experience.
Matt has documented the surfing world for decades, including this legend. Photo: MG
From your book, I wanted to ask you about the story about the man contemplating suicide in his car with the wetsuit on. What is your motive with stories like that?
I really believe in third person stories, and I believe in what I call astral projection. From a very young age, I was able to get inside someone else’s head and look out through their eyes. That is our sixth sense. Every human being has it, whether you’re tuned into it or not, it’s up to you, but I believe we can look into a complete stranger’s eyes walking across the street and really see what’s going on with them. Are they angry? Are they in a hurry? Are they upset? Are they happy?
My motivation for telling that story is that this was a really interesting surfing story. I met this guy up there in the Northern California cold and he was a very bitter, grumpy guy who was right on the edge. I took that and turned it into a third person story based on what he was telling me, about the bales and bales of weed, and the dogs that aren’t chasing the deer away, and all this stuff. Rather than saying, John Smith, 44, from Point Arena, California, was contemplating suicide the other day… Forget it. When you find a story like that, third person can really come to the rescue. Everybody shows respect. Now, am I writing this story so somebody doesn’t jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? No, not at all. I’m writing an interesting surfing story for my tribe, and that’s it.
Do you ever get emotionally attached to any of these stories? Do you ever find some of the more traumatic ones difficult to write about?
Every single one of these stories both exhilarate me. Upset me, reach me, touch me. Every story I write, I am 100 percent committed to. I look at it like diving into the ocean off a boat. I have an assignment. I get up on the rail, I dive off the boat, I’m underwater in that story world, in that person’s story, in that place’s story. I am completely and utterly surrounded by that story when I’m doing this. And when it’s over, it’s like breaking the surface and getting a gasp of air.
It really feels like I’ve been on some sort of trip. Because I really immerse myself in it emotionally and physically. So it is a very deep, all-inclusive experience for me as well. I never just sit there and throw darts at the board. Never. It’s always really important to me to tell a great story. A writer that does not seek excellence should put his pen down.
